Who's Read Moby Dick then

[kained&able]

I've read extracts not the whole thing though.

dave

 

[boskysquelch]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_Ship_Essex

http://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/

 

[Diamond]

Slogged through about 300 pages before giving up and haven't been tempted to return to it. I was reading an interesting little list of tips involving writing and the author, who was trying to make the point that writing is a very organic process and the main protagonist can and frequently does change as the story is written, explained that Melville originally planned the book around a character named Bulkington who features heavily in the first few chapters before being washed overboard allowing Ahab to take centre stage.

 

[isitme]

shouldn't this be in the wales forum?

 

[Mrs Magpie]

Woody Allen was asked if he had his time over again would he change anything and he said "I don't think I'd bother reading Moby Dick."

 

[sojourner]

Started it years ago, but never finished it

Still sat on the shelf.

 

[Spandex]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_Ship_Essex

I've not read Moby Dick - it always seems too much like a chore; like a book I'd be reading because I'm supposed to rather than I want to. I might be missing out, but when I always have a pile of other books calling out to be read I can live with that.

I have read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick, which tells the true story which is said to have inspired Melville to write Moby Dick. That's a great book, a proper page turner that as well as giving a insight into the Nantucket whaling culture in the early C19th is also a grusome disaster/survival story. I've recomended it on here before, but here's another chance to recomend it again

 

[Iam]

We were supposed to read at school.

I wasn't a very well behaved child, though.

 

[butchersapron]

One of the greatest books ever written. We extracted the technical stuff about ships and whaling gear and published it as a pamplet, sold out really quickly as well.

 

[Brainaddict]

For reasons I now cannot fathom, I chose it as a GCSE text. I don't think I really understood a lot of it though

 

[Pieface]

Nope. Read most of his others though - I have it sat on the shelf at home alongside Don DeLillo's Underworld obviously. Actually, they have one shelf between them

 

[El Jefe]

I've been reliably informed that the subtext is a reclamation of the white penis after slavery, but this may not be true.

 

[ViolentPanda]

i have.

but i'm not Fictionist.

So have I, but I'm not foo.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I've been reliably informed that the subtext is a reclamation of the white penis after slavery, but this may not be true.

How many times do you need to be told?

MysteryGuest doesn't give reliable information.

 

[boskysquelch]

It can be read as an allegory of the risks in trying to subjugate nature to the will of humanity, a rebellion against the evil and chaos in the universe, and/or a metaphor for the narrator Ishmael's search for the meaning of life. Moby-Dick, the white whale, is usually interpreted as a symbol of evil, God, or an indifferent universe.

In its complex examination of right and wrong (what Melville calls "Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate"), the novel dares to question not only the nature of humanity but also the nature of God. Ahab, the central figure, is a madman, but the model of the romantic rebel, hurling his defiance into the teeth of a vast and inscrutable universe. The novel explores other enduring American leitmotifs and themes as well.

For instance, despite Ishmael's extensive efforts and exhaustive description, he can never fully understand the nature of the behemoth Moby-Dick, suggesting the allegorical limits of human knowledge: efforts to understand God are inevitably fruitless and may even be fatal, as is the case here. This reading is reinforced by Melville's inversion of the customary representation of whiteness. Traditionally a symbol of purity, whiteness in the novel comes to represent a lack of meaning and even a terrible, evil void. The novel also explores 19th-century America's belief in manifest destiny and the inevitable exploitation that followed, shown here in the whaling trade, which echoes the despoiling of the American frontier through overhunting of the buffalo and the displacement of Native Americans.

pretty much what i thought when i saw the film at 12 .....and then again at that ae I'd already learnt of http://www.geocities.com/branwaedd/whitestag.html


but then obviously I wasn't gifted with friends, colleagues or acquaintances who saw cock & cuntbubbles where there are none.

/jakes.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I used to belong to a book club that prided itself on reading the most heavy-duty books ever written and on how much alcohol it could consume in one sitting.

I've both read Moby Dick and survived the Book Club 100 (a drinking challenge involving shots of beer).

 

[fieryjack]

I've been reliably informed that the subtext is a reclamation of the white penis after slavery, but this may not be true.

El Jefe is nearly right: the racial subtext is explored through the story of the cabin boy (Johnny McNegro). In actual fact the main thrust is about the reclaimation of manhood during an age where the disenfranchisement of the male had begun its inexorable roll forward: the West was largely won, they hadn't invented racecars yet and women's rights were probably on the rise etc. The fish is an obvious phallic symbol, lost in a vast, vaginal sea. Once you realise that the author had just lost everything in a messy divorce with his then-wife Greta Kukkonen, passages like the following lose their mystery:

surging forth amid the smoking horror the leviathan broke the roiling surface of its diabolic, salty womb, his milky coat purpling furious around the straining blowhole. The great eye-shaped opening convulsed twice; fire-white spume columned forth from the orifice, raping high into the unfeeling sky, tasting glorious freedom but briefly before falling back like the hot tears of war heroes. Ahab stepped up at the bow, his breeches full-swollen and magnificent. He raised his spear and for a moment was framed erect and precisely detailed. I saw him throw back his head and, eyes aflame with scorn and triumph, cry "You didn't need to take my bloody dog as well, you cunt [..edit to remove 150 page treatise on nature of freedom as symbolised by the evolution of the shape of the schooner..]"

 

[DotCommunist]

Nah, lifes to short. and it doesn't have spaceships in it, so no.

 

[boskysquelch]

or not

http://books.google.com/books?id=2W...=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA13,M1

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2711373

 

[Fictionist]

I have read Moby Dick* and I've been into hip hop since 1981. Sod you Fictionist


*I think I actually read it as a child with one of those magazine based 'Great Writers' series that 'gave' a classic book away with every issue. Hardback iirc, but with the thinnest internal pages of all time. Classy

From some of your posts I reasoned that you had been listening for a similar time.